September 17, 2014

Tokushige Kobayashi

koba@antenna.co.jp

Antenna House, Inc.

The first release December 2000 (ja)XSL-FO pre-recommendation

Version 5.0 (March 2009)～Supports both FO and CSS

Multilingual Support Hebrew

Arabic

Devanagari

Vengari

Gurmukhī

Gujǎrātī

Oriya

Tamil

Major Indic characters except Tibetan are supported.

Thai

Khmer

Lao

Vertical writing

ExtendedFloat (a)

Original Position of a image

PDF

EPUB

Image is automatically movedto the top of next page

Algorithm is specified in JIS X4051

ExtendedFloat (b)

US Department of Treasury, Washington DC

IRS publishes multilingual tax guides by AH Formatter.

MathML V3

New function of MathML V3.0Elementary Math

FO or CSS, which one you should select?

• The layout can be specified using either XSL-FO or CSS. Approximately the same layout can be specified by both.

• Many of FO properties have been quoted from CSS2. In addition, AH Formatter has been extending FO and CSS in parallel.

• The main difference between FO and CSS is the structure that applies the style.

FO

• FO is a technology for printing and is premised on batch processing on a server.

• XML for printing purpose is transformed into FO by XSLT, etc. The properties for layouts are applied to the transformed FO.

• In XSLT, elements and attributes can be specified by XPath. Properties are prepared as the attribute set (xsl:attribute-set) and the conditions for applying properties can be specified exactly and meticulously.

• Complicated processing can be described for creating FO.

CSS• CSS is a Web technology and simple and high-speed

processing and the dynamic layout will be required.

• Current CSS has a weakness in paged media. The layout specification to the paged media is discussed in W3C CSS WG now. The output to the paged media from AH Formatter is the AH extension at present.

• In CSS, the element and the attribute of XHTML, which apply the layout, is specified by selector rule. In addition, there is a complex cascading and priority rule.

• This structure is suitable when the applicable condition of a layout is easy.

Antenna House Recommends:

•FO for making an advanced and complicated page layout.

•CSS for making a simple page layout.